archibec.tumblr.com

Latkes. I am talking about latkes, but I didn’t want to pass up such a mad good chance for some killer alliteration. You understand.

Yesterday some people expressed a wish to have my latke recipe, and being the obliging and benevolent soul that I am, I acquiesced. Am acquiescing. Whatever. Here it is! 

6 large potatoes

2 large onions

1 ½ tablespoons of flour

2 eggs

1 teaspoon of salt

¼ teaspoon of pepper

½ teaspoon of baking powder

This is a flexible recipe. Last night I double-and-a-halfed it to 15 potatoes and about 4 and a half onions, because I fucking love onions. I like an oniony latke. To me this is the secret to latke deliciousness. However, the quantity of onion you like in your latke is up to you. The salt and pepper is also to taste, I think we ended up putting a bit more of each into ours last night as well.

STEPS:

Wash and peel the potatoes. This step sucks, sorry.

You’re going to want to grate them. You can do this by hand if you do not possess a food processor but boy howdy do I ever not recommend it. If you DO use a food processor, I extremely extremely recommend getting a grater blade to use instead of the regular one, as the regular one will just pulp the potatoes and that will fuck up the ESSENTIAL LATKE TEXTURE. However, if you cannot grate them  by hand and do not have access to a grater blade for your food processor it’s not TERRIBLE to just use the regular blade. No one will come to your house and harm you or anything.

Press the extra liquid out of the potatoes!!!!! If your batter is too liquidy your latkes will not hold together well. This step ALSO sucks, sorry. If you have an overenthusiastic 16 year old stepbrother to boss around I highly recommend getting him to do it. My other ~trick of the trade~ regarding “"Hanukkah water”“, as Ari calls it, is to use a SLOTTED SPOON to dollop the batter into the oil, as you can then drain the extra liquid out of each spoonful just beforehand.

The onions you can pulp up, who cares about the onions. (You’re gonna wanna food process these pretty hard imo but if you cannot, again, grating them by hand is ok!!!)

Put potato gratings, onion pulp, flour, eggs, salt, pepper, and baking powder in a big ol’ bowl and mix that shit all up.

Get deep pans and heat them over the stove, or use an electric skillet, either way. Fill about ¼th of an inch with vegetable oil (BEFORE YOU HEAT THEM UP JUST TO BE OVERLY CLEAR. DO NOT PUT THE OIL IN AFTER THEY ARE HOT. LOOK. I REALIZE THIS IS OBVIOUS BUT IT PAYS TO MAKE SURE) (Heating the pans is an imprecise science as every burner/skillet is different, but I usually do pretty high. On our old electric skillet we used the next-to-highest setting, and on our electric stovetop last night I had them on 6 (on a scale from 1-9).

When the oil is hot, dollop spoonfuls of batter into it (roughly ¼th of a cup, but I just eyeball it). If you are using a regularish sized pan you should be able to fit 2 or 3 latkes in it at a time.

The trick I use for telling if a latke is ready to flip is twofold. One, look at the edges. They should be golden brown before you even consider it. Two, nudge the latke gently with your spatula. If it kind of “floats” across the bottom of the pan without any resistance, it’s safe to lift the edge and check if the bottom is brown.

Flip yer dang latkes!!!!!!!!

NOTE: See all those floating brown crunchy bits? Remove them from the oil with a spoon or spatula before they burn and flavor the oil with burning. Put them on a paper towel to cool and then EAT THEM THEY’RE DELICIOUS AND YOU HAVE RIGHTFULLY EARNED THEM AS THE LATKE COOK

Once they’re brown on both sides, take ‘em out of the oil!!! The ideal way to serve latkes is as they come out, which unfortunately means that you, the cook, will be standing around in an unfortunate apron avoiding splatters of scalding oil while everyone else enjoys themselves, but there are some sacrifices you have to make. If you are unable or unwilling to do this, it is OK to put the latkes in the oven to stay warm until everyone’s ready to eat, although they will be SLIGHTLY less crispy if you do this. Layer them on a big metal oven tray with paper towel in between each layer and set the oven to 250 F or so. 

NOTES: This recipe probably serves about 3 or 4 people, I’d say? For reference, last night I more than doubled the recipe and we had 5 people and a ton of leftover latkes, with everyone eating probably between 3 and 5 latkes each. Regarding leftovers: This morning I put 4 of ‘em in our toaster oven on a sheet of tin foil and toasted them on the highest setting and then ate them and they were delicious. Slightly soggy, but delicious. You can also do this in the oven or even re-fry them if you’re feeling ambitious. I have never tried the microwave and it sounds vaguely sacrilegious to me but considering that I like my latkes with ketchup on them I am not in an overly great position to remark on that. 

SPEAKING OF TOPPINGS! Applesauce and sour cream obviously are the staples but hey, look. Listen. Ketchup is REALLY good, alright, look, just try it, the Jew Police are not going to kick your door in if you do, I promise. Another note regarding toppings: If you use the quantity of onions that I am advocating, putting powdered sugar on these particular pancakes will probably not be that rewarding, but 1. you are free to try and 2. SOME SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE IN THE NAME OF ONION.

She went to church and prayed for a child every Sunday, but no child came. She went to every midwife and wise woman for miles around, and followed all their advice, but no child came.

So at last, though she knew of the dangers, she drew her brown woolen shawl over her head and on Midsummer’s Eve she went out to the forest, to a certain clearing, and dropped a copper penny and a lock of her hair into the old well there, and she wished for a child.

“You know,” a voice said behind her, a low and cunning voice, a voice that had a coax and a wheedle and a sly laugh all mixed up in it together, “that there will be a price to pay later.”

She did not turn to look at the creature. She knew better. “I know it,” she said, still staring into the well. “And I also know that I may set conditions.”

“That is true,” the creature said, after a moment, and there was less laugh in its voice now. It wasn’t pleased that she knew that. “What condition do you set? A boy child? A lucky one?”

“That the child will come to no harm,” she said, lifting her head to stare into the woods. “Whether I succeed in paying your price, or passing your test, or not, the child will not suffer. It will not die, or be hurt, or cursed with ill luck or any other thing. No harm of any kind.”

“Ahhhhh.” The sound was long and low, between a sigh and a hum. “Yes. That is a fair condition. Whatever price there is, whatever test there is, it will be for you and you alone.” A long, slender hand extended into her sight, almost human save for the skin, as pale a green as a new leaf. The hand held a pear, ripe and sweet, though the pears were nowhere ripe yet. “Eat this,” the voice said, and she trembled with the effort of keeping her eyes straight ahead. “All of it, on your way home. Before you enter your own gate, plant the core of it beside the gate, where the ground is soft and rich. You will have what you ask for.”

first, stuff that people are clowning on that isn't actually a red flag at all

using starlink satcoms for their overall [surface] communications

i know it's fun to clown on elon musk but starlinks are like. Fine. they work fine as satcoms. this is not the issue. none of these problems would have been solved if they'd been using KVH or somebody else instead

also these have fuck all to do with the tiny sub, since radio waves physically do not penetrate water enough to be useful for communications lol

the stupid game controller to steer

it's actually super common to use COTS (commercial off the shelf) parts like that instead of some bespoke steering system.

they're easily replaceable if they break, they're designed to be integrated into larger systems, and you don't have to do a huge amount of design work before you can even steer your thing

here's one example of this. but it's pretty common

that being said. here is the fucked up design stuff that i notice

Where The Fuck Are The Chairs

if you don't have seats inside your vessel, you don't actually have a way of securing passengers during rough movement. i suspect that this makes it very dangerous or difficult to ascend quickly in an emergency.

they have had known issues with communication

[source: the independent]

i will grant that underwater communications is not an easy problem to solve unless you're physically running telephone wires

but this is fucking unacceptable lol

[source: the independent]

ignore the video game controller thing

i presume that they mean "messages in the form of text, sent via an acoustic signal", not "they are literally using cell phones to text each other" because obvs cell phones (and most radio) would not work

it's actually extremely unclear to me what system the sub and the mothership are using to communicate. idk if this is a "technology reporting hard" issue or if these people are being deliberately cagey. anyway they're probably using some form of underwater acoustic communications, but what specific form it takes idk

regardless, the fact that they've had problems with this system in the past is a red flag

and the fact that their sub has apparently no internal navigation system is also a red flag. "not having GPS" isn't really, since GPS doesn't really work underwater (you need radio 😔), but they should have some kind of internal navigation-- at the very least "here is my speed and heading and based on that my expected position is here on a map"

in a power failure situation, they would have been SOL

[source: the independent]

"everything is done with computers" = "nothing works in the event of a power failure"

it seems like AT THE VERY LEAST in the event of a power failure, you need to be able to drop your ballast and ascend quickly.

it is not clear that they had the capability to do that

something weird going on with their pressure hull

[source: nbc]

while it is "normal" for structures that are exposed to regular massive changes in pressure to have fatigue (imagine bending a piece of metal in and out over and over, eventually it will break-- you want to catch and replace that before it happens), it's weird to me that

the vessel's depth rating was downgraded

without any public statement about what repairs were done, it nevertheless went back to the 4000ft depth less than a year later (in 2021)

they obviously have no "black box" system or any way to locate a missing vessel

most boats are required to have this! because most boats are required to be registered with and inspected by various authorities!

these guys deliberately skirted that rule by launching off a boat rather than from a port and therefore avoiding the need to get registered or inspected. lmao!

[source: nyt]

Company Culture Is The Killer

complete disregard for safety is really what killed these people

[source: the independent]

obviously if this is your CEO your company culture is totally fucked. beyond saving. you do not have a regard for human life.

for reasons unknown they didn't flag the authorities that the vessel was missing for hours and hours

[source: the independent]

not that it likely would have helped to save these people if they had been alerted earlier, but it shows a desire to cover up mistakes

and like. obviously. you should get your shit inspected. nobody taking paying passengers anywhere should be allowed to be their own safety inspection authority.

the original sinking of the titanic was what led to SOLAS (safety of life at sea) rules being instituted. they've been updated several times since then, but they don't yet cover submersibles like this, since they are relatively new. it's likely that this incident will cause a new interest in updating the rules. as they say: every regulation is written in blood

I can fake my way through a lot of my job by pointing at things and asking 'and what happens if THAT breaks?' That's a humorous oversimplification, but one of the first things I was trained in was making failure modes effects and criticality analyses (fmecas), where the general approach is that you look at your hardware on the level of the things you remove and replace, line replaceable units (lrus) and look at one item at a time, and identify HOW it can fail, and what the local/subsystem/system effects of that failure are. There's more than that, but the only other key thing is the failure rate/mean time between failures, how often it fails. This is great! This lets you identify single points of failure! It lets you double check redundancies and is an excellent way to walk design engineers through a system and be sure you aren't missing something.

You also, at least for your single points of failure, identify the severity of a failure mode occurring, and the likelihood of a failure mode occurring, and generate a risk matrix. The further into that very-severe-very-likely corner something is, the more you had BETTER do something to mitigate it. And to be clear, I've rarely worked programs that rose to the level of risk to human lives, and there were still serious CONVERSATIONS HAD about those high-risk failures. This is one tool, it's limited, it doesn't deal with simultaneous failures, but I could train some rando engineer to do this in like... an afternoon.

I am also chewing my fingers off at the lack of REDUNDANCY in here. Some systems, I get why everything can't be at least n+1 redundant. There's a reason my car doesn't have five tires. But if the consequences of getting a flat tire were like, '95% chance u die,' I'm pretty sure that would change. I've been paying attention to the detail they share about design, and the combination of barely being able to talk to the ship (which is doing your navigation) and only having the one controller (COTS is all well and good, it's not a bad way to get MTBCF data, but apparently this controller isn't that good? and why can't there be backups? wired backups??), and possibly having nothing on board for PNT, that's freaking me out! I know comms get much harder underwater, and I know submarine equipment is expensive, but it boggles my mind that there isn't any kind of inertial navigation system, even if it's only there as a backup with your surface navigator.

Right away, the controller and the comms are single points of failure. If one of those fails, your system fails, in a way where system-level consequences are... dire! If you're free to hit the yeet button and float to the surface and wait for rescue, aight, but you're going down to explore a tangled metal hulk in a part of the ocean so deep that most subs can't handle the pressure. Technically, for a FMECA, you're supposed to look at the worst case scenario effect of a failure mode for each piece, and right away, we've got two major chunks of hardware where the system effect of failure is... 100% fatality rate. I'm not surprised these guys didn't have any kind of certification. This is very outside my wheelhouse, and I have very little detail, but it's still sending me into professional agonies.

(Which doesn't even address software reliability, which affects comms, which affects their ability to navigate, which makes that part of the system another tissue paper shield between passengers and death. And the environmental aspects!!!!! There's a reason planes are so vigorously maintained between flights! If you throw a system into a hostile environment, over and over, it's gonna die much earlier than it would in a lab setting. The bathtub curve! Wearout! I keep muttering things about 'well surely for an ocean system they would have done rigorous accelerated life testing--' but then news drops about like, that hull derating, and idk, maybe surely they wouldn't!)

One last thing. Redundancy. I have no real info about this system, no idea if there's redundancy in the propulsion systems, whatever. But say you have a part, part A, which is 90% available. That's an abysmal availability number, it means that one day out of every ten, it's broken and needs to be fixed. But let's say you have two of part A, and you only need one of them to be working at a time for your system to function. You need A1 OR A2. You need the probability that at least one is working. That's 1.0-[(1.0-0.9)*(1.0-0.9)]=0.99. Just by using two of them, now your system is broken for one day out of every hundred rather than ten. If you have part B, which is 99% available (still bad for a hardware part), one-of-two redundancy would get you a similar OR probability of 1.0-[(1.0-.99)*(1.0-.99)]=0.9999. It's broken one day out of every ten thousand. It's all applied statistics. Simple redundancy can get you so far, and if this was the safety measure they decided to skimp on for the sake of #innovation, I usually would be shocked, but the headlines are really making me think this is probably a factor. Any single point of failure will drive your overall failure rate, and they've got at least a few big ones, so those compound.

BIPOC = Black, Indigenous and People Of Color 
FR: « L’autisme est surdiagnostiqué. Les critères diagnostiques doivent être plus stricts. »